I hope you’re right, @PAR, but my reading of the (admittedly old) John Giolas post is that this section says otherwise:
“All other products – the Bartok Streamer (sans headphone features), the Rossini series, the Vivaldi series – will continue to be sold and serviced exclusively within our existing and trusted two-channel network of dealers.”
I read that as the Bartok HPA will not be available via the two-channel network in the US. (It seems Canada is different.)
If that’s true, this feels spectacularly misguided to me. Consider these scenarios, which are actual examples from members of this forum:
Customer is keen on a dCS DAC for a mix of headphone and speaker listening. Tries the Bartok HPA somewhere, and wonders how the next step up compares. Dead end. “You’ll have to go somewhere else to see how the Clock and the Rossini and the Vivaldi compare.”
Customer starts with a Bartok HPA for a mix of headphone and speaker listening. Eventually heads back to the same dealer for an upgrade. “Nope. Try someone else.”
@Ermos I agree with you that it’s likely good if dCS are reaching new people with the Bartok HPA. I don’t see any reason why this should be done exclusively, though. At least not from a customer’s point of view. Maybe dCS know something we don’t. If that’s the case, in my opinion they need to be much, much clearer about how they think we should be approaching their range. At the moment — at least in the US — it’s tending toward a mess in my opinion. That we’re even talking about this rather than how much we love our DACs and our music is a good indication that there are improvements to be made.
Ben , your interpretation would only be correct if Giolas said anywhere that the availability of Bartok HPA was restricted to the head-fi market vendors. He doesn’t .
In précis form:
Bartok HPA will be the only dCS product that you will ever be able to buy from head-fi vendors.
The rest of the range will only be available from traditional dealers.
This does not exclude HPA from being sold by the latter. It is like Naim Muso. That is sold in all sorts of places. However for everything else you have to go to an accredited Naim dealer ( who will also sell you a Muso if you want one).
All other products — the Bartok Streamer (sans headphone features)…
…vs. the much simpler:
All products…
(Emphasis mine.)
If the entire range — including the Bartok HPA — will be buyable from traditional dealers, then wooohoooo. I just fear that’s not what John wrote.
The sentence “Our entire range will be available from traditional dealers” is an easy one to write, after all. That he added clarifications around headphone and non-headphone versions suggests to me that he did so for a reason.
Within the Asian markets at least, Pete is spot on; traditional dCS channels have access to the full dCS range, including the Bartok HDAC. While a new set of additional Head-Fi channels have access to just the Batok HDAC.
Yeah it would seem a little silly to keep that product out of their core dealer network. The Bartok HPA is a smart gateway product - I came from the head-fi world and it represented a way to bridge to a “summit” type DAC with a great headphone amp, especially with expanse. I went through a dealer but I know the headphone ecosystem can be a bit more online focused so going that way opens the market. And if they got hooked on dCS it’s not super hard to find dealers to work with.
But I’m grateful for the forums here because this thread helped me accelerate the move to Rossini+clock before the cost increase that would have priced me out of getting a clock, and now if these reports are true on Apex upgradability I’ve got that option eventually.
Admittedly, this combination of price increases, new product rollout, setting a process for these upgrades, mixed with these representation changes in the US will be interesting to see in a few weeks.
@andrewt I’m not defending dCS for their price increases but have you purchased milk lately? A year ago I paid $2.29 for a gallon of milk. Last night at the same Walgreen’s I paid $4.49, an increase of 96%. I realize the supply chain mess may be different for milk vs. audio equipment, but price increases are the new norm for many consumer items.
dCS engineers and other staff are mostly British. The British drink a lot of tea. Drinking tea (British style) involves milk. There is therefore a significant milk element in the production of all dCS products .
And if British people didn’t drink tea and milk, but milk and tea, what would the price of the products be? Probably even more expensive. We are lucky that the British drink tea with milk and not the other way round.
A dealer on Head-Fi is saying the Bartok with HPA will be sold only through headphone dealers. I bought mine from a local full dCS dealer. Why the differentiation now (if true)? Why would I not want to or be able to buy it from my local dealer. Makes no sense on their behalf.
Mostly I’m just curious why they would choose to divide their product availability this way (if true). How a business decision like this gets made. What the strategy is. Just out of curiosity.
One would say look at the indices in the market available to all of us and ask yourself why you have stubbornly avoided them.
If you and your advisers have chosen a conservative allocation then that very well be your appropriate mix however if it is then you should be satisfied with that return profile.
As you know I am a huge supporter of dCS but , bluntly, this whole thing seems to have been handled in a poor way
I initially felt the same way, but, on reflection, dCS is almost certainly in the middle of a multiple product launch process where the people that needed to know ahead of time (the press, the dealers etc) were under embargo until dCS had everything ready for the launch.
On this occasion, the embargo was broken and dCS couldn’t launch overnight (they might well still be putting together the web content etc) and the press probably wouldn’t be best pleased if they invested time writing up the story, only to find it was no longer newsworthy.
As a fellow marketeer, I can’t help but feel sympathy for the dCS crew whose planning (product launches generally involve a lot of work) was thrown into disarray and customers (understandably) demanding answers. As a marketeer, you want the launch to be a positive experience for everyone involved.
If you and your advisers have chosen a conservative allocation then that very well be your appropriate mix however if it is then you should be satisfied with that return profile.
This makes sense in that, if you are among the very wealthy, then you can afford to put a larger amount in riskier investments. If you’re merely well off, then the risk may be too high to aim for such rewards.
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